Blockchain on AWS

Easily build scalable blockchain and ledger solutions

AWS provides the simplest way to build scalable blockchain networks and ledger applications for your business

Blockchain technologies are often used to solve two types of customer needs. In the first case, multiple parties work with a centralized, trusted authority to maintain a complete and verifiable record of transactions. An example is a retail customer looking to connect its suppliers with a centralized ledger that maintains a transparent and verifiable history of information related to the movement of a product through its supply chain. In the other case, multiple parties transact in a decentralized manner without the need for a centralized, trusted authority. An example is a consortium of banks and export houses looking to perform cross-boundary transfer of assets (e.g. letter-of-credits) amongst each other, without a centralized authority acting as a liaison.

If you need a centralized ledger that records all application data changes, and maintains an immutable record of these changes, AWS provides a ledger database. This database is high-performance, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable, eliminating the need for building complex audit tables or setting up blockchain networks. If you need the immutable and verifiable capability provided by a ledger, and also want to allow multiple parties to transact without a trusted central authority, AWS provides a fully managed, scalable blockchain service. AWS’ blockchain service makes it easy to setup, deploy, and manage scalable blockchain networks, eliminating the need for you to rely on expensive consulting implementations.

Use Cases

Track and verify transactions with centralized ownership

Manufacturers want to store data from multiple systems into a centralized ledger that accurately tracks the production and distribution lineage of their products. In case of issues manufacturers can quickly trace the root cause of defects and take preventive actions.

HR and Payroll systems often have to track and maintain a record of an employee’s details such as payroll, bonus, benefits, and performance history. By implementing a centralized ledger, customers can easily maintain a complete record of the digital history of their employees in a single place.

Insurance: Insurance applications often need a way to better track the history of claim transactions. Instead of building complex auditing functionality using relational databases, insurance companies can use a ledger database to accurately maintain the history of claims over their entire lifetime.

Execute transactions and contracts with decentralized ownership

Trade: Trade consortiums are looking to reduce time and complexity of cross-boundary payments and asset transfers (letter of credit) by directly transacting with multiple parties such as importers, exporters, insurance, and banks in a decentralized way.

Retail: Consortium of retailers want to partner with banks and third-party loyalty programs to streamline customer reward programs without needing a central entity that processes rewards.

Banking: Syndicated loans are ones where a group of banks lend together to a single borrower. In a traditional syndicated loan, banks rely on faxes or emails to share complex information back-and-forth, which delays the process. Groups of banks are looking to execute transactions in a decentralized and trusted way to exchange information quickly and eliminate the need for an intermediary.

AWS Capabilities

Capabilities of ledgers with centralized ownership

Capabilities of blockchain networks with decentralized ownership

Centralized Central, trusted authority owns and manages the ledger, and is shared with any number of parties that are working together

Decentralized Multiple parties can transact with one another without having to know or trust each other. Each party, known as a member, owns a peer node in the network

Immutable Uses an append-only journal that stores every transaction into a block. Blocks are cryptographically-chained together in a sequence and cannot be deleted or modified by the central owner or any other entities.

Immutable Committed transactions are stored in blocks and are cryptographically-chained together and cannot be modified. Once a transaction is committed, it is replicated across all members making it impossible to change or delete.

Verifiable Uses cryptography to create a concise summary of change history. This secure summary, commonly known as a digest, can be used to cryptographically verify the lineage of the data in the ledger.

Verifiable Each member stores a local copy of the ledger and can independently verify and ensure that the contents of the ledger are accurate. To make any change, members of the network need to validate a new transaction, keeping data across all peer organizations consistent

Transparent Entire data history can be easily queried, providing a complete and transparent log of information.

Transparent All committed transactions are attributable to one or more entities, providing complete transparency to all members. In permissioned blockchain frameworks, such as Hyperledger Fabric, transparency can be configurable such that only select group of peers can access information.

Fast Ledgers with centralized trust don’t require distributed consensus to execute, allowing them to easily scale up and execute transactions faster than ledgers in common blockchain frameworks.

Removes intermediaries Each peer organization can initiate a new transaction using encoded application logic. Once a transaction is initiated, it is replicated across all peers in the network, allowing multiple parties to access and validate the information. No intermediaries are needed to act as a liaison between the members, making complex transactions more efficient and less expensive.

Products

Amazon QLDB is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log ‎owned by a central trusted authority. Amazon QLDB tracks each and every application data change and maintains a complete and verifiable history of changes over time.

Amazon QLDB

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) and Amazon Managed Blockchain provide the right tool for each job. Both of these fully managed services help companies manage business transactions that require full auditability, and remove the complexity and undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in implementing and managing a ledger database or creating and managing a blockchain network.

Amazon Managed Blockchain

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum. Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the overhead required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. Once your network is up and running, Managed Blockchain makes it easy to manage and maintain your blockchain network. It manages your certificates, lets you easily invite new members to join the network, and tracks operational metrics such as usage of compute, memory, and storage resources

AWS Blockchain Templates

For customers who are looking to manage their own blockchain network and just need an easy way to set up and get started, AWS Blockchain templates are the right fit.

Blockchain templates provide a fast and easy way to create and deploy secure blockchain networks using popular open source frameworks. These templates enable you to focus on building your blockchain applications instead of spending time and energy on manual setup of your blockchain network. AWS Blockchain Templates deploys the blockchain framework you choose as containers on an Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) cluster, or directly on an EC2 instance running Docker.

AWS Blockchain Partners

AWS provides the broadest and deepest capabilities and the largest global infrastructure for building end-to-end blockchain platforms, cost efficiently and at scale. APN Technology and Consulting Partners offer a rapidly growing selection of blockchain and distributed ledger solutions with support for multiple protocols.

Customers

Healthdirect Australia is a national, government-owned, not-for-profit organization that has been helping Australians manage their health and wellbeing for over a decade.

“Healthdirect Australia operates in a heavily regulated industry, and it is critical that our compliance data is correct and auditable. With Amazon QLDB we look forward to having a complete and verifiable history of every change in our system, making it simple to audit when and how we arrived at our current state. Regulatory compliance is fact of life for healthcare companies, and Amazon QLDB enables us to easily track the controls we have in place and understand how they have changed over time.”

Bruce Haefele - General Manager, Technology, Healthdirect Australia

The Guardian Life Insurance Company is a financial services and insurance company whose offerings include life and disability insurance, employee benefits, and dental insurance.

“Given our vast partner ecosystem, we are exploring the decentralization and immutable tracking benefits of blockchain for potential applications in our insurance business. We believe blockchain can improve the transparency and efficiency for stakeholders in these networks to transact, while still maintaining an independently verifiable lineage of activities. However, blockchain frameworks are complex and difficult to operate. With Amazon Managed Blockchain, we can now easily create Hyperledger Fabric blockchain networks to test and learn without worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure, networking, and software configuration."

Daniel Johnson - CTO and Head of Innovation, Guardian Life Insurance Company

Smaato, one of the leading online ad exchanges in the world, sees over 20 billion bid requests/day pass through their exchange.

“All participants in the online advertising and real time bidding market segments are interested in transparency throughout the entire lifecycle of an online ad auction, from the initial auction, to the winning bid, and ultimately through to the final impression delivery and who it’s actually shown to. Since we act as a centralized point of trust in this value chain, we’re really excited about Amazon QLDB. It offers a scalable, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable ledger that would allow us to maintain a complete and auditable record of all our auctions. We’re looking forward to collaborating with AWS and the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database team to bring more transparency to our ecosystem.”

“As critical financial market infrastructure, the industry relies on us to provide innovative solutions that reduce risk, increase transparency and evolve with market and regulatory needs. We believe that blockchain technology represents a generational opportunity to re-imagine post-trade infrastructure. We are pleased to be using Amazon Managed Blockchain to explore possibilities with Hyperledger Fabric, where we can continue to lead industry initiatives around the exploration and adoption of Blockchain. Amazon Managed Blockchain automates the deployment of blockchain infrastructure, bringing high availability and durability in a fully managed package, accelerating the adoption of distributed ledger technology.”